How Many Iraqis Died in the Iraq War?

How many Iraqis died in the Iraq War? That’s the kind of question that should be asked, especially if you happen to live in the countries that launched the war that killed so many.

The results from a new poll commissioned by the British media watchdog group MediaLens exposed a startling disconnect between the realities of the Iraq War and public perceptions of it: Namely, what the Iraqi death toll was. When Britons were asked “how many Iraqis, both combatants and civilians, do you think have died as a consequence of the war that began in Iraq in 2003?,” 44 percent of respondents estimated that 5,000 or fewer deaths had occurred.

That figure is so staggeringly, mind-blowingly at odds with reality as to leave a journalist who worked long and hard to bring home the reality of war speechless.

And polls done in the United States have offered similar conclusions. A Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) poll (3/1/06-3/6/06) that asked how many Iraqi civilians had been killed since the beginning of the war yielded a median estimate of 5,000 deaths.

And when respondents were asked in a different poll (AP/Ipsos, 2/12/07-2/15/07) to give their “best guess” about civilian deaths, 24 percent chose the option of 1,001 to 5,000 deaths.

These answers are, of course, way off the mark. Estimates of the death toll range from about 174,000 (Iraq Body Count, 3/19/13) to over a million (Opinion Business Research, cited in Congressional Research Service, 10/7/10). Even at the times of those U.S. polls, death estimates were far beyond the public’s estimates.

Of course, these findings are disheartening because they reflect a very distorted public perception of the war. But they are indicative of an even bigger problem: corporate media’s inadequate coverage of the human costs of U.S.-led wars.

It seems that much of the mainstream media took Tommy Franks’ infamous quote, “We don’t do body counts” (San Francisco Chronicle,5/3/03), to heart, because Iraqi victims of warfare were rarely of interest in news reports.

And when they are, they could be a massive undercount. A December 1, 2011 CBS Evening News report told viewers that “more than 50,000 Iraqi civilians were killed in the war” (FAIR Action Alert, 12/2/11). This figure was sourced to iCasualties.org, which had one of the lowest estimates of civilian casualties at the time and warned readers that the number was probably a severe undercount.

The “corrected” figure that CBS put forth 11 days later was 115,676 civilians killed, and sourced to Iraq Body Count–still one of the most conservative estimates to be found (FAIR Activism Update, 12/13/11).

But the main issue here is that the press has kept the public in the dark: How can one make a decision about the impact of war if they don’t know, even roughly, how many deaths there were?

are a striking illustration of how a “free press” imposes ignorance on the public in order to promote war. Future wars (or “interventions”) are obviously far more likely when the public within an aggressor state is kept clueless about the human cost.

UPDATE: The World Health Organization’s estimate of 151,000 violent Iraqi deaths from March 2003 to June 2006 should also be noted.

Michael E:
The invasion of Iraq was a war of aggression. Saddam Hussein was trying his best to AVOID a war with the U.S. You have a pretty short memory son. You don’t remember the following sequence of events in the winter of 2002-2003 and spring of 2003?
1.Bush demands “You let the weapons inspectors back in or we’ll invade your country.” Saddam lets the weapons inspectors back in.
2.Bush demands “Well… now you have to let them roam around and go wherever they want or we’ll invade your country.” Saddam reluctantly lets them roam around wherever they want, jumping through the second hoop to avoid a war.
3.An increasingly frustrated Bush now demands “Either you let us interview your scientists or we’ll invade your country.” (By the way, when was the last time the U.S. let IAEA weapons inspectors into the U.S. to inspect American nuclear weapons facilities? How about never? But hypocrisy never seems to register in an American mind.) So Saddam grudgingly lets them interview Iraqi scientists. By this time anyone in the world with more intelligence than a retarded 10-year-old can clearly see which side is desperate to have a war and which side is trying their best to avoid one even though it means submitting to humiliation after humiliation.
4.Bush then demands “Unless you let our spyplanes have overflight rights over all your territory, not just in the no-fly zones, then we’ll invade your country.” Saddam, again, reluctantly complies. For the fourth effing time.
5.STILL this isn’t good enough for Bush, Cheney and the oil-hungry warmongers. Now they make a demand that no leader on the planet would agree to, that Saddam leave the country in the next 48 hours and take his sons with him or else the U.S. will invade his country. When Saddam refuses to comply Bush smugly folds his arms and exclaims “See?? See?? Saddam Hussein is being defiant!! Time to invade Iraq!!”

Sorry but that’s a war of aggression, plain and simple. If you can’t see that it is then you need to take the red, white and blue blinders off and start seeing the world (and the U.S.) for how it really is.

It goes without saying that all deaths, property destruction etc. that results from a war of aggression (including every death from sectarian violence that only started when the U.S. deposed the one stabilizing factor in Iraq, its Baath Party government such as it was, which was a 100% predictable result) can be laid at the doorstep of the aggressor nation. And you as well as this article neglect to mention the fact that the “liberators” of Iraq have used a hell of a lot of depleted uranium munitions that are currently causing Iraqi leukemia rates to skyrocket and have turned large parts of the country into a carcinogenic wasteland for the next several thousand years. If you think the invasion of Iraq was a good thing or justified then you are part of a very tiny minority because the rest of the world is smart enough and has enough psychological courage to know aggression when it sees it. Enjoy your fantasy world where America is this white knight that never does anything underhanded because the world at large sees the U.S. for the cowardly bully that it is, picking on small countries that it thinks won’t fight back but avoiding a conflict with North Korea which actually DOES have W.M.D.s and flaunts them, literally daring the U.S. to do something about it. Nah, the U.S. doesn’t want a real fight, it lacks the stomach for one. It will stick to beating up on oil-rich but militarily weak failed states and ignoring the real threats because that’s what kind of country America is. Like the Third Reich but with only a tiny fraction of the balls.

[…] that the war would be both costly and deadly–killing not "tens of thousands," but hundreds of thousands of Iraqis–which is why they were protesting the invasion that Burns was eagerly anticipating. […]

[…] that the war would be both costly and deadly–killing not “tens of thousands,” but hundreds of thousands of Iraqis–which is why they were protesting the invasion that Burns was eagerly anticipating. […]